Purple
by Cail M
Summary: Neville hangs out in the rain eating too much sugar. The War Between Good and Evil has ended and wrought huge changes on the world and Neville's life when Good lost. The morning before he has to attend a funeral Neville fixes his hair. Slash.


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Rating/warnings: PG-13 but probably just barely and that for a curse word and at one point a tiny bit of innuendo. It is slash, though the story does not focus on anything very romantic or sexual, it focuses on shallow things though, candy and hair.  
Disclaimer: The characters are J.K. Rowling's, but this version of them after they have left school and the second War Against Voldemort (he won) is over is my own brain worm..  
Thanks: To Bec and Ms. Townsend for their extremely helpful betas. And thakns for Bare Naked Ladies for being my musical obsession during the writing of this and only getting /one/ line from a song of theirs stuck in the story. And Neville! Thanks to Neville! He's my favorite! Wooooo, Neville rocks! I love Neville!  
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**Purple**   
  
  
The house was going to eat him, surely.   
  
The house had a strangely sharp roof, like wings spread out over the two additions, peeking over the original building. It was a big house with a porch in the front and a deck on the back and trees all around. The windows were dirty, and there was dust in the attic, but besides that it was beautiful in its present condition. The porch roof hooked down from the rest of the house, looking, under two second-floor window-eyes, like a beak.   
  
An overgrown garden was at high tide in the front yard, pink roses frothing up from the green bush, so heavy that their long stems almost bent to the ground. Sweet faced pansies cringed low, newly planted, the fresh dirt in their bed welling up around their lower leaves like crumpled bed sheets. They stood a disordered guard, a dozen yellow purple and black faces smiling up at the strange half-sun shining in the clouded sky.   
  
A young man wearing a chartreuse robe was also looking at the sky, his round face a picture of slightly worried interest. He was alternately chewing on his lower lip and on a clear crystal candy attached to a stick.   
  
He sat in the sun on the step three down and one up, just out from under the porch roof. From a distance the sight was of a young man in danger of being gobbled up by the hawk-house behind him but that worry never even entered his sun-spot blinded mind.   
  
The sun lay across his knees and curled up in his crumpled lap, turning his odd auburn hair into a shiny red and gold tinged halo, making the rumples of his robe dark shadows, like the shadows under his eyes and the sad lines around his mouth.   
  
The lavender wisteria climbing to the roof cast a shade on his back, across his shoulder, and it touched his cheek with a sweet-smelling shadow. He chewed on a crystal of sugar, just nicking it with his teeth and rolling it around with the tip of his tongue. It made small noises in his mouth, and he couldn't help but want to listen to it. Forever. It felt infinite, just sitting there, not needing to do anything else or be anywhere else.   
  
Something crept into the back of his mind and slowly turned around and over with the unstoppable style of a sundial in sunlight with a dash of passing time. He was worrying about the likeliness of cavities, an image of small furry black spots crawling into his soft gums, the sugar crystals turning black and burrowing into the white places on the tops of his teeth, drilling deeper with insubstantial buzzing noises. He blinked the stuck sunrays out of his eyelashes and tried not to think like that, failing before he started trying.   
  
The sun had almost rolled away but the clouds weren't in that kind of mood; they felt like a compromise, they peeled themselves open in places and let a patchy sunlight stream through. Neville tipped his head back and silent-whistled with a mouthful of sugar, thinking that the light falling in those beams would make such slippery ladders if anyone tried to climb them.   
  
The rain dribbled down, almost hissing where it hit leaves, and even the grass flinched away from the cold raindrops, trembling with each direct hit so that the whole lawn as stirred up.   
  
A rabbit broke cover and ran from one clump of peonies to another, though Neville didn't notice it. He watched the step between his feet turn dark grey slowly, like a wet shadow had fallen across it. Steady grey speckles darkened the stones in circles the size of squashed peas. He realized with a shaky feeling that they were the size of teardrops, too. Teardrops shaped like raindrops.   
  
He cradled his cheek in his hand, sucking sugar flavored spit away from the corners of his mouth, thinking about the shape of all the tears he should be crying. His eyes flickered shut for a moment and he could think of only a teardrop-shaped pendant, well, his teardrop-shaped pendant. He touched the silver on the cord around his neck and picked at the colored stones in slippery smooth settings on either side of the cold metal. 'Not stones,' he reminded himself, 'paste, paste stones, not just plastic.' So they felt heavy but they looked real, and they sparkled a little when you turned them in the sunlight, thought not this kind of watery sunlight. Though to come to a cutting edge and the first point, teardrops weren't shaped like that; they fell and flattened out round and warmly wet.   
  
He worried about the rain soaking into his shoes and into his socks and into his feet. He licked the rock candy, the sugar beginning to sting the places on his tongue that were tender from licking the knife. No--no, not so suicidally, he didn't want it to sound so sad, so he tried not to even think about it like that, because he hadn't meant a suicide with spilled blood and open veins, he had just wanted the last crumbs of orange cake on the serrated edge and it had tasted like marmalade cake, which was disgusting and like metal at the same time which was interesting so he just kept licking even when there was no more cake. He put it out of his head and tried not to worry about it. Instead he thought about his shoes, not about how the knife's edge was too hard and his skin was too soft but how the two rubbing together felt close to ripping something, but rather about how he needed new shoe laces, the stripes on these were fading. The blood didn't last for long anyway.   
  
He shut his eyes, tipping his head back, catching teasing small drops of rain on his tongue and having them melt away, sucked up by the stickiness of sugar. It wasn't even enough rainwater to wash away the feeling that he was being unwise and childish to sit there with his candy, not paying attention to the lightning that was surely coming.   
  
What he really wanted had been candy called Blood Sugar that came in cinnamon-colored papers and smelled like when his nose bled--but his grandmother had been horrified that he would even think of such a thing and stopped him. Wait, or she would have been horrified; he felt suddenly sick to his stomach, unable to remember whether she had been there to tell him... or if she hadn't. He tried to count the days back in his mind, but that wouldn't work either, he didn't know the date or even what day of the week it was, he only knew it was midday because the sun was shining straight down from it's zenith through the rain that was falling. He was also sure that the dead can't scold, so she wouldn't mind now if he gobbled vampire candy. She was dead.   
  
He kept trying to find a way to put it less harshly to himself, trying to find a euphemism to drag into his sad hiding-hole for company. The problem was that when he thought of the word euphemism 'making love' was the only one that came into his head. When he was a child, no one had ever told him things like 'he passed on' or 'they're in a better place now'. Sometimes he remembered and thought maybe it was because he had no one around him who believed these things when tragedy fell on him. No, it wasn't a better place, and they had still been there, but it might have helped him now if someone had tried to comfort him then. He was struck by the lack of double-speak his Gran had ever talked at him; she had always meant what she said. He felt, for a moment, as if this realization was going to make him cry. It didn't.   
  
Whether she had been with him, or not--if he had just felt like she was there, hitting him between the shoulders with a dark look that felt like a thin pin to stick a butterfly to a wall, a pin, to skewer a specimen... even if she hadn't been there, he had gone funny in the head and weak in the knees, so he had ended up buying a Mystery flavored stick of Rock Candy. It was pretty, wrapped around a stick, spiraling like something that grew, looking like something that formed in a cave and hung out with bats at night.   
  
He stopped licking the thing for a moment when he thought about that, the taste of bat didn't go well with sugar. It ended up being no mystery at all. With the free-range title of 'Mystery' it would seem that something mysterious and mind boggling should be thought of to flavor it. The end result however spoke of a stunning lack of imagination, not at all weird and exciting, though it was undeniably sweet.   
  
He knew what the Mysterious flavor was. That taste was thick in the back of his throat, that unadulterated sweetness. It was sugar flavored.   
  
He pulled his arms out of the sun for a moment, afraid, when he looked up, of the bright heat of the sun and the pallor of his arms. Wouldn't it burn, shouldn't it burn, isn't the shade a safer place?   
  
The sun was still shining as the rain fell more heavily. He worried about the rain in his hair, worried it might ruin the spell he had placed there. Placed there. As if it were precariously balanced on top of his head like a book--like the summer he was eleven when he tried walking around with a book on his head so he would have amazing presence and posture and an alluring way of walking when he started at school. He hadn't exactly thought of these things as his reasons at the time, he had just done it. When he stopped his shoulders slumped again and he still found himself trying to pull his head back into his body like a turtle.   
  
He touched his hair, it felt dry, though there might be a few drops of rainwater in it, suspended like translucent pearls, but a tiny bit of water was probably not going to ruin it. Right? He felt a twang of worry but grinned anyway, a strained grin. In the book it said you were supposed to keep it dry for an hour. Well, all right, beauty magazine, not book.   
  
He really hoped that it wasn't a blond-only spell and that the iris, which was kind of a reddish tinge and the wisteria worked as well as the buttercup and oatmeal that the recipe called for. He worried that it was going to work and then he worried that it wasn't. People would look at him funny if he turned his hair blond but they would really look at him funny if he turned his hair purple and that was the whole point, to be looked at.   
  
He grinned, a little less strained this time for having realized that his reason was purely wanting more attention, he pushed his hair back from his face, feeling the its unnatural static, slick and spiky like it had shampoo in it, shampoo spiked with something that had the strange consistency of ink. Carefully, he left it alone.   
  
He worried that it would stain the hair on his arms. That would be awful. Or it wouldn't be awful but someone else would think it was awful... he leaned into his knees carefully and licked the clear sugar crystals.   
  
He started picking at his teeth with the sharp bare tip of the stick the sugar came on until he worried about splinters and stopped.   
  
His hands were sticky from sugar and the rain and his hair so that when he rubbed his eyes for a moment they stuck shut until he panicked and rubbed then hard, peeling them open like peeling back the skin on a grape.   
  
Suddenly, like stage-magic someone took the candy from his sticky fingers and when he opened his eyes it was simply gone.   
  
Draco saw that panicked look growing in Neville's watery eyes so he took the candy out of his sleeve and kissed the edge, smiling down at Neville from such a height that his smile looked like a frown.   
  
"Oh, screw the raspberry iced-tea, I was going to bring you some but you look busy." Draco laughed sarcastically at Neville's staring off into space trick and held up the glass full of clinking ice, he was lying, he had gotten it for himself. He shrugged and touched Neville on the back of the head, right on the swirl of his cowlick. He pulled his hand back and looked at his fingers, surprised by the static feeling in them. He licked them, tasting sugar from the sun-tea and something that reminded him eerily of the color green and spinach.   
  
"Neville?" His voice was hushed to hide the laughter. "What have you got in your hair, salad?"   
  
Neville gulped and grinned, looking at his the backs of his hands, which were covered in small red marks. Tooth marks from where he kept nibbling at them anxiously. The marks were always white at first but they turned darker and astonished him by looking like a close-up part of a painting done in those little dots and slashes of pointillism, only his pointillism was so abstract that even he didn't know what it was a picture of. Bumble Bee Resting On Flower, he titled in pretense, Woman At Window. Raining Purple.   
  
Neville took a deep breath and felt a shiver rise in his shoulders--it was an easy charm the magazine had said, but almost everything came harder for Neville than it did for the rest of the wizarding world. He had been ashamed of that for a long time but this was one thing that he really wanted to be able do on his own, all alone just because--well, just because it was strangely important. He let the breath out and murmured the last component of the spell. The simple part, the instructions had said. "Conchyliatumus." He squeezed his eyes tight shut and waited for some sort of reaction, or for the world to flip upside down in surprise. He rather suspected he might be a splendid wizard in an upside down world. But that was but one wish among a million.   
  
After absolutely nothing happened, he peeped his eyes open and looked around.   
  
No, no wonder there was no gasp, he was sitting alone on the porch. Draco must have gone inside. The screen door hadn't squeaked or maybe it had, sometimes Neville didn't hear these things with his eyes shut. He stood up, brushing his robes around his knees where they hung baggy, shabby-by-choice. It made him hate his chubby knees when his robe flapped open and showed off his white legs.   
  
Flinching in anticipation of the nail-pulled squeal that the door always gave when he touched it he opened the door, and as he had suspected it groaned in protest at his touch. He stopped to nudge the hole in the corner of the screen with the toe of his new tennis shoe. They were amazing shoes, he loved them, they were hideous and so light they didn't seem like shoes at all but startched socks. Light and hideous. It was the same way he felt the house and he didn't even know the hungry gaze it had for him. It was such a pretty house, just a little run down and yet he worried about it so that it ached in the pit of his stomach. He got the same feeling about Draco, when he was really worrying about the big things and he couldn't stop his brain from click click clicking and frightening him with the intensity of anxiety, it worried him all the time. Except when his eyes were shut tight enough he was too closed to feel anything at all.   
  
He struggled through the screen door making it groan more as it widened enough to let him through. Under his hands it always groaned with displeasure, when Draco opened it there always seemed to be a soft thrum and a pleasant chirp of springs. The springs sprung, slamming back in place and almost pinching his fingers. He gave the hallway a quick look, it was empty, he looked down, empty except for the dirty front doormat, he wiped his shoes and ducked into the bathroom, first door on the left.   
  
He turned on the light and immediately shut his eyes before he could even think of looking at himself in the long mirror. Before he could cheat and look at the answer before he knew the question. He was wincing already, though; he knew he would hate it. He tugged aside the sleeve of his robe and opened one eye just enough to look at his wrist where he wore his shiny new digital watch. So many shiny plastic presents from the world this house lived in, this amazing non-magic place of the plastic, the shiny digital, sparkling mechanical and magnetized everything.   
  
Ah, time-wise it was okay. He didn't have to worry about time, he was sure that. He would get there in time, and early too because Draco, almost conscious of the passage of time would come in and growl, "It's time to go."   
  
He caught sight of himself in the mirror.   
  
Shit.   
  
He searched his reflection for something nameless for so long.   
  
He held in his breath, not counting to see how long, not even shutting his eyes against the bright light and reflection, just holding his breath, one hand over his ear, half-deaf. He waited for the quiet inside of his head to turn thick, thick with lack of breath, what a strange blanketing, someone spreading out a thick cloth, no, no, marmalade, and then spreading the thickest layer of marmalade around the inside of his head, muffling all.   
  
He had never liked marmalade, but worse it was Draco's favorite and there was always marmalade with toast and marmalade cake when they visited Narcissa. The quiet was sweet and cloying but Neville didn't think about anybody from inside of it, not the dead or the living. It was amazing how breaking the rhythm of breath broke the worried rhythm in him. It broke more then that, temporarily, something that he sometimes hoped would repair itself when he breathed in again. Maybe if it never started again and he couldn't take that hot first breath after holding on to nothing-maybe then it would be fine.   
  
The breath did come, it came and left him full of air feeling light and airy. It wasn't a good feeling though, it made his head ache.   
  
He touched the gold buttons on his white shirt worried about color on the back of his collar, long stripes down his back as if the purple might rub out of his hair and onto everything he touched. King Neville and the Purple Touch.   
  
He pressed his hand against the hair in front again and glanced shyly at the mirror. It was a strange fuzzy purple, a thick, polleny purple that hung against his head in flat lavender and black streaks. It was messy and irregular and in an instant he changed his mind and loved it. He looked like a strange striped tree frog, or the sleepy purple bird who had taken a bath in his ink well and had to be rescued and cleaned.   
  
"Look! Look!" Neville crashed out of the bathroom with the grace of a ballet dancer with a bucket on his head. He held his head up high, twirling so he caught sight of the longer purple strands when he tossed his head. He searched the empty rooms for Draco, calling all the while as he went.   
  
The living room had nothing in it. Well, not anymore. Dark empty walls leered at him from all sides and he was reminded uncomfortably of an institution, he thought mental and then thought medical so as not to frighten himself too badly. He had spent many a rainy afternoon at St. Mungo's and those days were not to be remembered in dark rooms.   
  
He charged through the kitchen, heedless of his untied shoelaces, he even peeked into the grey refrigerator to see if Draco was hiding there. The refrigerator smelled rotten though, so he shut it without looking inside.   
  
He crept through the hall and crashed up the stairs, holding one hand against the smooth banister, chanting, 'Splinter splinter splinter splinter' in the back of his head until he came to the first landing and jumped out onto the fresh second floor carpeting.   
  
There were round marks in this carpet where chairs and tables had been. The wall was full of little black holes, pushpins and nails, where there used to be pictures and paintings hanging. Not that he had ever been here when there were pictures and paintings on the walls, he could only imagine the painting of a bowl of fruit and a pear in the white place next to the stairs. Oh, and a big expressive impressionistic painting at the dark end of the upstairs hallway of flowers, maybe roses, big pink floppy roses. A painting that someone bought when they still lived here, because of the roses in the garden. Or maybe the gardener was the painter as well.   
  
They had burned them. The pictures. The wretched, worrisome They had burned all the pictures, those startlingly motionless photographs gone in puffs of chemical smoke. Whole family albums burned up, the brown curly-edged photos from sixty years ago and the bright summer beach pictures from last summer of children in tiny swimsuits, the wedding pictures and the baby pictures and the birthdays and the 'oh, don't take my picture!' pictures. He didn't like to think about the lost pictures, so he sped up. He ran his hand along the wall, still looking for Draco, though his heart had half gone out of it, counting pinholes in the wall and imagining the paintings that would have there, never imagining the family photos.   
  
Draco, of course, hated all of it, he hated all the Muggle furniture, said he hated the smell of Mudbloods about the place. It had two redeeming qualities, it was almost empty and it was his. A present from his father. He would have hated the house completely except that it was his, just as completely.   
  
Neville had noticed that Draco seemed to hate everything Muggle except jewelry, a strange exception but Draco had a strange fascination--obsession even--with finding bracelets and necklaces and earrings and putting them on Neville. Draco even told him that it made him look pretty. Neville felt like a walking jewelry rack, he didn't wear it because he wanted to but because he wished he wanted to.   
  
Neville was worried that if he put all the jewelry on one day he would be too heavy to move, a Neville with jeweled armor to protect his neck and hands and wrists. The way the real silver shone with a bit of spit and polish and real cut diamonds in ugly gold settings made him feel a little sparkly, caught in their reflected light. There were the paste teardrop-pendants and the gold chains and the gaudy rings and the plastic clip-on earrings and the tiny metal charms shaped like frogs and violins and bowtie pasta. Yet sometimes he was left with the fear that he was being bribed and bought very easily.   
  
Neville walked with his hand against the wall, but when he tripped past one door he stopped himself so strangely in his tracks that someone watching would have thought his finger snagged in a pinhole. He craned his neck and saw a little through the doorway, saw his own reflection in a mirror across the room.   
  
Draco was standing in the bedroom--their bedroom--leaning with his back against one of the bed posts, his elbows up in the air and his fingers tangled in a complicated string he was tying around his throat, a white bowtie.   
  
Neville drifted in, running his hands through his hair and looking lost, because there were no more pinpricks to count. There was nothing to count except reflections and all those eyes looking back at his worried him, so he couldn't even think of counting them.   
  
Draco had filled this room with mirrors, everywhere he looked there were mirrors, Draco hung his reflective surfaces on the ceiling, a reminder to his favorite pastime, narcissism. His dozen reflections were tying a dozen ties, though one of the mirrors refused to tie the bow properly and kept wrapping it around his head (but that mirror was haunted, it was one of the ones on the ceiling, which made things a little spicy sometimes.)   
  
'Draco isn't even going to look at me,' Neville worried. It worried him so much it made him feel all shivery, like there was a whimper deep in his throat, but at the same time he felt like burying the hurt deep in his stomach. He shut his eyes and was going to hold his breath again until the world was hot and black and breathless and silent but the voice stopped him.   
  
"Oh, Neville," Draco still wasn't looking at Neville, he was staring at himself. He was almost talking to himself, working his mouth and tongue and lips, feeling air against his teeth just to make sure it all still worked as it should.   
  
Neville stood in the doorway, waiting for his lavender halo to register with Draco. He waited and waited and held his breath for five counts and let it out, then held it for ten, working himself up to a good oxygen deprivation moment.   
  
Draco took his time, retying his bow twice and then he turned, looking to Neville with a grunt that made it sound as though he was asking for approval. "How do I look…?" Finally, he was looking at Neville, finally looking and really seeing and staring with extreme shock on his face, in his cool eyes, making nests in his hair. For a moment Neville was terribly afraid that Draco was so startled and upset he might start yelling. Instead, he just stood there and then let out a soft cackle.   
  
"Oh, maaaan, man." He jumped forward, pulling a lock of hair into Neville's eyes and laughing again, but not in a bad way, just surprised. "So pretty, so pretty." He tangled his arms around Neville staring with all his attention, which made Neville feel odd and almost uncomfortable to be as thoroughly looked at as Draco looked at his own reflection. "I have something for you, my ridiculous wonder." He let go of Neville for a moment and retreated to the wardrobe, one of the few non-reflective objects in the room besides the bed.   
  
'Ridiculous wonder?' Neville wondered, and stared at his reflection shyly, yes, ridiculous, he agreed with that part. He fingered his robe nervously while Draco opened a drawer and took out something on a silver chain.   
  
Draco came back and stood close enough to put the chain around Neville's head, almost lassoing him with it. He kept cooing "Ooooh, pretty." So many times that Neville was quite unnerved and would have been on his guard had he known how to be.   
  
'Not you, he doesn't mean you, he's talking about the necklace.' Neville told himself, an oddly calming thought, even though it made him feel guilty, so he didn't put up that guard.   
  
Draco kissed him once like a lover then undressed him like a nurse, uninterested in all he had seen before. He made Neville change quickly into his black dress robe, still stiff after being worn only once before-to that dinner with the marmalade cake, actually, Draco had slipped money into the pockets of it as thoroughly as if he were kneading flour into dough, while Neville tried to tie a cravat, Draco had hissed one last warning, "Behave." But that was six months ago and this was different, Neville was sensible enough to know that.   
  
His necklaces clinked together when Draco grabbed the loose folds of Neville's robe and pulled him close, spreading his lips against Neville's face. Funny how the chains clinked together, the teardrop pendant a different note than the Celtic knot, they clinked like the money in his deep pockets, 'You never know when you'll need to buy something at a funeral,' he imagined Draco reasoning. Neville pretended he felt pity for Draco because he didn't know that money can't buy you love.   
  
At last Draco came up behind him and watched his own reflection over Neville's shoulder. He nodded in approval, "You look prepared for this occasion."   
  
Neville almost giggled, 'A stiff occasion, get it, get it, get it.' He chanted in the echoy spaces inside his head. He could have kicked himself for actually thinking that, but it was too late, and he could fidget because Draco was tying the white ribbon of a bowtie around his neck.   
  
"No!" he suddenly slapped Draco's hand away and there was a static silence between them, Draco very close to striking back, even though his hands were still and his face had an empty warning look.   
  
Neville reached out apologetically and took the white ribbon, he had to pull it out from between Draco's fingers, but Draco let him win.   
  
Neville chomped down on his lower lip and tied the wide white ribbon around his head, the bow flopping heavily into his eyes. Draco shook hit head at this ineptitude, untied it and carefully retied it around Neville's head the way he wanted, but in a tidy way that kept Neville's bangs out of his eyes and the boy sat up, as stiff and possibly even jaunty. He kept hissing things under his breath that Neville didn't listen to, but he knew Draco though he was absurd.   
  
When they had finished with the bow Neville opened his eyes wide and looked at himself in the ceiling mirror he actually gave a tiny howl and asked anyone who would hear him, "How can I do this?! Purple? Purple?!" He touched the ends of his hair with the tips of his fingers, enchanted and revolted, in love and disgusted.   
  
"It's supposed to be a sad occasion." Draco snapped, he wouldn't tell Neville how much he liked the purple hair until he wanted something. He thought about it for a moment and advised finally, "At least look contrite. If someone asks you about it, it was an accident and they'll believe that."   
  
Neville knew people would believe it of him; he was always getting into odd tangles with spells no one else had a problem with and needing to explain why he was late, or completely nude or on fire. The look he gave Draco was a strange one full of guilt and joy and gratitude and Draco shrugged, snapping at him, "You're ready, c'mon, let's go." He stalked out of the room, surely off to turn on the air-conditioning in the car. He loved air-conditioning and always pretending he had it on full blast for someone else's sake, usually Neville's.   
  
Neville lingered in the bedroom, staring at himself. Even the haunted mirror seemed shocked enough to behave and reflect truly, for the time being. He reached his hands comfortably into his pockets and felt that hot money that Draco had given him. He felt guilty and confused all over again, and touched the white bow in his hair.   
  
He couldn't hold his breath this time, no he just had to go, walk around with it, the it, the purple hair the subtraction of the woman who raised him, from his life, the addition of a lot of sympathy from strangers and white flowers, he had to learn how to live with purple hair and have no one to visit on Sunday ever. Funny how getting what he wanted made him so dizzy feeling on the inside.   
  
In the car Draco was waiting impatiently, pressing the buttons to make the wipers swish across the windshield and the taillights blink on and off abruptly. Punching buttons usually made him relax, but it seemed to wind him up tighter, and when Neville shut is door Draco ordered him to put his seat belt on before he would put the car in gear.   
  
Neville tried to be distracting so Draco would cheer up, or calm down or at least stop driving so fast. "I used a Conchyliatum charm." He said it in a tone that attempted to be suave and scholarly at the same time.   
  
"Conchyliatum, to dye purple," Draco shrugged and Neville stared at him, once again woebegone and impressed by Draco's knowledge of Latin.   
  
Neville shut his eyes. He imagined his own purple corpse for a moment, 'to die purple' and then he reached up a hand and touched his hair. He gulped for breath a couple of times until the heaviness was gone, and then he almost laughed. It wasn't nice of him to go to his Gran's funeral with such disrespectful hair. Perhaps that was the only reason he had been able to screw up the courage to actually do it.   
  
  
  
  



End file.
